Wednesday, March 6, 2013

"Audience show up for the information, but they stay for the stories"This line which I came across here explains the simplest and only formula for attracting a following through communication. If you doubt that, just study a popular politician or spiritual guru or your favorite teacher.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

A friend of mine is a big fan of Grateful Dead. I guess he is one of the Deadheads. I do not know much about music and even less about Grateful Dead. Therefore, I could not relate to his enthusiasm or his almost fanatical worship of this group.

I saw the above picture with that profound line in this lovely article about Grateful Dead. Everything fell into place. That line and the philosophy that Grateful Dead embodied is a lesson for everyone and every organization. The lesson is simple. Know your core, know your licorice. No one can mess with you.

However, it seems from the mess we create for ourselves, we cannot follow this principle. The temptations are many. Therefore, in our attempt to be all things to all people, we wind up being nothing.Agencies never fail to surprise me. They never stop from preaching to their clients that they should stand for something, a mission, an ideal. Yet when you question these very agencies what they stand for or what their core is, you will receive one of the vaguest answers that will make a politician proud. And like any politician, most agencies stand for only one thing.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

The futility and stupidity of conference calls. This video makes the point brilliantly and subtly. Nothing good comes out of these 'con-calls'. Is it an ego-trip? It is definitely a masochistic trip for the participants.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

(Via. Courtesy Gavin Heaton)Trust Onion to come with the best satire on social media. You cannot but agree with the dissection of social media gurus and agencies in this video as they are so true. "Using your brains to think of an idea and your skills to implement it? That's the old model."

Another example:

"Our firm was hired to
expand SpeedStick deodorant's Twitter footprint. But they already had a
Twitter feed -- and we of course had no original ideas. So we hired a
separate company to create thousands of fake Twitter accounts designed
only to follow SpeedStick. We were able to increase the number of
accounts following SpeedStick from 300 to 900,000 in less than a week.
And the best part is, all of these accounts were robots -- so we didn't
have to tweet anything, because nobody was reading it."

The inevitable conclusion?

"Ideally, real human users will leave social networking
altogether, and all that will be left will be thousands of robots,
talking to each other, who we can then advertise to."

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

(via)I cannot help but love stuff that takes a dig at things that marketers and agencies embrace with the passion of a zealot. The video above might be a spoof but I assure you it is not way off the mark. There are companies that help you get followers, likes, clicks and yes, even views. It is also a well-known fact that there are brands who use the services of these companies (abetted by agencies of dodgy reputation). When a marketer's performance matrix depends on the number of followers, clicks, likes and views acquired, what can you expect.

In my opinion, there is only one viral that matters - 'has the product gone viral?'.

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About Me

When people ask me what I do, I drop words like experiment, creative, strategy, technology and intersection. I surely don't know what it means. If you have figured it out, do let me know. I am not complaining though as I have done some interesting projects for companies like Wipro Technologies, Nu Street Technologies, 3dSoc and Lenovo. Amidst all this there was even an attempt, unsuccessful one at that, to create an agency for the digital age in India with a friend of mine. I have also done numerous pro-bono projects that includes a winning nomination for an idea at http://www.good.is/.
In my previous avatar I was an adman and a marketing bloke. Agencies like Ogilvy and JWT were adventurous enough to let me head all kinds of brands - from large ones like Unilever, BP to small local brands. BTW, these are the only two agencies I have worked for. As regards marketing, I stumbled into it during the internet (dotcom) boom days. It was a very good exposure with my then employers, JobStreet.com, kind enough to give me even an international exposure.
Over to you.